Aravind Adiga’s Latest Opus

I don’t particularly care for Aravind Adiga’s work. I’d attempted to read The White Tiger but I found more fulfilling uses for my time. Amitava Kumar’s review of the book for The Hindu a couple of years ago had me happily hiccoughing expletive laden expressions that convey the phrase ‘you can say that again’.

Now, he’s back with Last Man in Tower. Was it in Timeout Mumbai that I read a cynical note on the title’s grammatical errors? I just read an excerpt from Last Man in Tower on Granta. Adiga’s latest opus is set in Bombay and possibly revolves around an elderly and repugnantly nostalgic gentleman named Masterji. Playing connect the dots, I wouldn’t be surprised if the plot is about the loneliness of the elderly in modern India intersected by unscrupulous builders coveting redevelopment rights for old buildings.

Adiga represents the very worst type of opportunism – the self-righteous ‘I speak for the oppressed’ kind. I can understand that this kind of writing panders to a specific kind of Western reader who has a fetish for third world misery but the fact that readers in India lap Adiga up like a dog at noon is completely beyond me. Adiga mines misery and poverty as eloquently and thoroughly as Rio Tinto. The ore he seeks is the culpability and remorse he would have us feel for getting on with life. He isn’t interested in the stories of the deprived as much as he is in magnifying their ugliness. I’d advise those who want to read about the real India to check out Mridula Koshy’s If It Is Sweet or more seasoned writers like Rohinton Mistry.

BPT Garden

I did a bit of tree spotting at the Bombay Port Trust Garden this morning. The garden isn't outstanding but it is fairly well maintained and sits on the eastern waterfront. Apparently, it was a garbage dump till the early 90s when residents (and predictably not the civic authorities) living around the site turned it into a garden. The trees are surprisingly tall given how young the garden is. We had the venerable Dr. Marslin Almedia (author of The Trees of Mumbai) guiding us however, he was partial to long asides, lots of jargon and then he got tired and had to sit down. Poor thing, he is ancient.

We were informed of the names of many of the trees but I can only remember a couple. This is a jarul tree (lagerstroemia speciosa) which incidentally is the state tree/flower of Maharashtra. Its leaves fight obesity and diabetes when drunk as a tea.

This unusual tree grows on my street and it's always intrigued me with its regular and sudden shedding of all its leaves. Barely a couple of days later, the tree is smothered by new growth. The one on my street is a 6 storey giant but the BPT garden had smaller versions of what I learnt is called a cannon-ball tree (couroupita guianensis). It grows unusual flowers from its trunk which transform into large woody inedible fruits.

It's local name is Kailaspati and it's sacred to Shaivite Hindus who offer it to Shiva because the cannon-ball flower has a stamen that resembles a shiva lingam protected by naga serpents. It's got a strong fragrance, falling somewhere between pleasant and unpleasant.

A traveller's palm (ravenala madagascariensis).

Can't remember the name but gorgeous flowers.

Yellow trumpetbush (tecoma stans).

Also spotted some birds - loads of koels, red-whiskered bulbuls, red-vented bulbuls, purple rumped sunbirds (saw a male doing a courtship display), flowerpeckers, tailor birds, pond heron, cattle egret and coppersmith barbet (heard but not seen). The garden was also choc-a-bloc with nesting crows which might explain why there were so many koels around.

Directions: The BPT Garden is on a cul-de-sac opposite the Colaba bus station, down the road from Sassoon Docks.

The Geographer's Library by Jon Fasman

This is a tiresome catalogue of antiques masquerading as a novel. Tagged as a mystery, it’s only mildly absorbing in a handful of places. In Norman ruled Sicily of the 12th century, the royal geographer, Al-Idrisi has a collection of objects as varied as flutes and chess pieces stolen from a hidden trunk in his home. These objects become scattered across the world until the middle of the 20th century when a Soviet gulag commander sets off on a murderous treasure quest to collect them all. These are not even the main plots of The Geographer’s Library which is chiefly concerned with Paul Tomm a chronic underachiever who works for a teeny-weeny newspaper in a mofussil town in New England. Tomm is asked to write an obituary about a recently deceased resident, Jaan Paahapev, an Estonian immigrant and a lecturer on Baltic history at the local university. Obviously, the antiques, Mr. Gulag and the dead Estonian are related. There’s your mystery served with a dollop of history.  

Embassytown by China Miéville

In sci-fi movies, the otherness of extraterrestrials is often portrayed through their physical divergence from the human form. But sometimes, seeming alien isn’t so much a matter of tentacles and scales than something far deeper.

Before the humans came, we didn’t speak so much of certain things.
Before the humans came, we didn’t speak so much.
Before the humans came, we didn’t speak.

Imagine a distant world inhabited by a race whose sentience is so dissimilar to ours that we can’t even begin to fathom their perception of existence. A species that can’t grasp the ability to distort truth; to utter a simple lie, they must resort to gradually dropping clauses with the resultant “Before the humans came, we didn’t speak” an untruth that only a couple of them can muster. The enigmatic Ariekei are certainly alien in appearance with multiple eyes on stalks, two mouths, two sets of wings and hooves. But, it is their unique Language that sets them apart, moulding their very being. Bremen, a human ruled state on a far-away planet is the first to make contact establishing an outpost – Embassytown – within the only city on Arieka. Their initial attempts to contact the Hosts, as they honorifically refer to the Ariekei, fail. The Hosts speak with two voices simultaneously from their two mouths, something a human is incapable of. The Hosts ignore attempts by artificial intelligence as well as synchronized speaking by two different individuals because it would seem that for the Ariekei, language and sentience are one and hence a word however well articulated is meaningless spoken by a computer which lacks sentience or by two different minds. The humans overcome this challenge by breeding pairs of clones on Arieka who are raised to think and act identically, assisted by an artificial link. These ambassadors, MagDa, CalVin, JoaQuin, whose names are portmanteaus of the names of each of the pair, speak Language and establish protocol to govern relations and trade between the Hosts and humans. The Ariekei are skilled at biorigging – biological engineering- creating vehicles that graze and semi-wild factories run on steppes. It’s this technology that the humans’ home state, Bremen, seeks to trade. In return, the Hosts receive goods and but more importantly gratify their curiosity about their guests. This curiosity takes many forms; the strangest perhaps is that of the simile. Since the Ariekei are incapable of referring to something that they haven’t seen with their many eyes, when using a simile, they can only compare with that which exists – a rock split into two and then mended, a man who swims with fish in an underground pool and a girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what was given to her – all staged to allow them to compare – living similes.

It’s this last living simile through whose eyes we experience the eccentric tale that is Embassytown. Avice Brenner Cho grows up in Embassytown leading a relatively uneventful childhood save the mysterious event that turns her into a unit of Language. Avice has the good fortune leaving Arieka when she is discovered to be immune to the physical effects of interstellar travel – an ability that leads her to become an immerser, piloting spacecraft through deep space. On one of her interplanetary pit-stops, she meets Scile, a linguist who she subsequently marries. Scile convinces a reluctant Avice to take him back to Arieka where he hopes to learn Language. Avice’s return to Arieka coincides with the arrival of a new ambassador. No ambassador has ever needed to arrive before, they were all bred locally. EzRa are neither locals nor clones. Whilst Embassytown is in a tizzy over their home state’s intentions, it’s only when the new ambassador speaks to the Hosts do the Embassytowners realize that the torpor of their tiny colony at the edge of the known universe will change forever.

You might ask why ask why I’ve exerted so much effort in summarising the plot when I could have just told you how much I enjoyed Embassytown and left it at that. But with Miévile, nothing is ever as cleanly dichotomous as like and dislike. Embassytown is fiendishly complicated and it will challenge even the most patient reader. True to his style, Miéville adds no annotations or explanations. His books require an absolute immersion from the word go and Embassytown is no exception. With that tiny investment of effort in place, Miéville leaves us with no doubts about his ability as a master storyteller who crosses genres like I hop over pavement turds, frequently and in bounding leaps. Embassytown is completely unlike any work of science fiction I’ve ever read. Its aliens are so wholly alien. Its themes challenge our notions about existence, thought and language. And then there’s Miéville’s delightfully inventive language, for he creates truly otherworldly images.

A kilometre below, the demesnes of the Host city. Plateaus and cultivation and simple massive rocks, fractured, their fractures filled with black weedstuff. Meadows crossed with tracks and punctuated by habitations. More grown architecture: rooms suspended by gas-sacs watched us as we flew, with simple eyes.

Leaving Embassytown and then the city felt as dramatic as entering immer. It might have been beautiful. Swaying through fields, even now during the breakdown, farms ambled hugely after their keepers if they still had them, or alone. Symbionts cleaned their pelts. The farms would birth components or biomachines in wet cauls.

Orchards of lichen were crisscrossed with the gut-pipework that spanned out from the city, still looked after in places by tenacious Host tenders. A long way off were steppes where herds of semiwild factories ran, which twice each long year Ariekene scientist gauchos would corral. We hoped to find a few of these cowboy bioriggers left, to trade their creatures’ offspring.
Miéville inspires me. He is an extraordinary dreamer and a stupendous writer. I could shower him all day with clichéd adjectives but all that sycophancy would be inadequate.

You can read my other reviews of Miéville's work here.

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

Even those whose general knowledge is shaky at best could probably identify the Thames (albeit incorrectly pronounced) as the river that runs through London. But, the rivers of London? Who’d have reckoned that grey London has nearly a dozen rivers, most of which are lost or hidden? I knew about the Fleet, an ancient ‘once-was’ river reduced to a sewer and then finally covered up. It’s sole above ground reminder is a famed thoroughfare named after it and for decades a euphemism for the press. It’s in a backdrop of this geo-history that Aaronovitch, who has written scripts for Dr.Who, sets his amalgam of urban fantasy and paranormal mystery.  

Peter Grant, a freshly minted constable with the Metropolitan police in London, is assigned to investigate the discovery of a decapitated body at Covent Garden. This is supposed to be his last real case as his superior decides to move Peter to a desk job that he thinks is more in keeping with Peter’s character. At Covent Garden, however, a bizarre turn of events drags Peter towards a very different and uncertain future. A ghost claiming to be a witness to the decapitation attempts to give Peter evidence. Soon after, he is apprenticed to Thomas Nightingale, an inspector with the Met and resident expert on the supernatural. More bizarre murders occur whilst a fight breaks out between two antagonistic demi-gods. Mother Thames, in the physical manifestation of a Nigerian matriarch, lords over the Thames estuary south of the Teddington locks. Her daughters are the ancient lost rivers of London; Beverley, Tyburn, Lea, Effra and many others who flow hidden beneath the city’s streets. In Aaronovitch’s world, each is a latté skinned riparian goddess. Upriver is the realm of Father Thames and his sons. But old Father Thames wants to regain control over the city and Peter Grant becomes responsible for averting the imminent war between these inscrutable river spirits. Amidst rounds of mediation, Peter must work out who’s behind the spate of otherworldly killings while learning magic tricks from his wizard mentor.  

Aaronovitch's strength lies in his ability to reinvent old myths for a modern multicultural age. We witness this most finely when Peter steps into an old warehouse and encounters the river divinities for the first time.  

Arrayed on a leather sofa was as fine a collection of middle-aged African women as you’d find in a Pentecostal church, all of whom gave me the same onceover that Beverley had. Seated incongruously among them was a skinny white woman in a pink cashmere twinset and pearls, looking as perfectly at home as if she’d wandered in on her way into town and had never left. I noticed that the heat wasn’t bothering her. She gave me a friendly nod.

But none of this was important because also in the room was the Goddess of the River Thames.

She sat enthroned on the finest of the executive armchairs. Her hair was braided and threaded with black cotton and tipped with gold, so that it stood above her brow like a crown. Her face was round and unlined, her skin as smooth and perfect as a child’s, her lips full and very dark. She had the same black cat-shaped eyes as Beverley. Her blouse and wrap skirt were made from the finest gold Austrian lace, the neckline picked out in silver and scarlet, wide enough to display one smooth plump shoulder and the generous upper slopes of her breasts.

One beautifully manicured hand rested on a side table, at the foot of which stood burlap sacks and little wooden crates. As I stepped closer I could smell salt water and coffee, diesel and bananas, chocolate and fish guts. I didn’t need Nightingale to tell me I was sensing something supernatural, a glamour so strong it was like being washed away by the tide. In her presence I found nothing strange in the fact that the Goddess of the River was Nigerian.

In some ways, Rivers of London reminded me of Mieville’s Kraken; an urban mythology of lost gods and spirits. Whilst the book is a page turner, there’s something missing. I can’t quite put my finger on it, I think it’s the lack of balance and interconnectedness between the two principal sub-plots; the reverent – the vengeful murdering ghost and the genii locii - in this case - river spirits. At first, Aaronovitch does give both stories equal attention but becomes partial to the former. Despite the interest generated by the mysterious murders, it’s the story of the rivers that’s most evocative. I wish he’d pursued that angle more. Then again, his intention was probably not to explore lost history but create a supernatural mystery. Oddly, the American version of the book has been renamed Midnight Riot which incidentally is the climax of Rivers of London.  

You can check out a map and a description of London’s lost rivers here.  

Yeoor Hills

This morning, I went to Yeeor Hills which is the portion of the national park adjacent to Thane. the forest is badly encroached here with loads of modern construction and shanties in the guise of 'local villages'.  

The morning's first sighting was a Greater Coucal, believed to be an auspicious portent in Western India. Although, we saw a number of birds, it wasn't very satisfying. Most of the sightings were very brief including a large cuckooshrike and a crested serpent eagle. However, there were a lot of chestnut-shouldered petronia also called Salim Ali's sparrow. There are two in this picture, one in the denuded branches right in the centre of the photo and another slightly plumper among the leaves to the left.  Unfortunately, I didn't get to see any grey hornbills which I am desperate to sight. 

There were some interesting looking reptiles though. On this tree, we spotted a lizard and bark gecko.  The lizard is sitting on the left rim of the large depression in the trunk and the gecko is at 10 o'clock from the lizard.  

There was a striking lizard with a bright red head and black body sunning himself on the side of this tree.  After a couple of minutes, he sauntered up the trunk and his red head dimmed to a more modest brown. 

I can't seem to figure out the name of this plant. It was flowering all over the forest.  

Under the Duvet by Marian Keyes

Under the Duvet is a compilation of articles and other non-fiction pieces by Irish novelist Marian Keyes, originally written for newspapers, magazines as well as including some unpublished work, composed in the same vein as Amy Tan’s The Opposite of Fate. My carts always seem to come before my horses. I think to truly enjoy an anthology like this; you ought to have read and enjoyed at least a couple of books by the author, which unfortunately I hadn’t. In fact, I hadn’t even heard of Keyes until I ripped open the brown librarywalla wrapping paper to discover that the book within wasn’t Anne Dunlop’s The Revenge of Lady Muck which I had ordered but something to do with bed linen. Fortunately, Keyes writes quite well and has a flair for the droll. However, she has just a smidgeon of a tendency to be repetitive with her style of jokes. It’s understandable when you consider that these were originally independent pieces. Nonetheless, Keyes seems interesting. Her books might be worth a dekko.  

Flamingos and Forts

When the British stitched the islands of Bombay to their northern neighbours, Salcette and Trombay, they created a shallow bay at Sewri in what is literally and geographically the armpit of the city.  Mangroves and mudflats are the prominent features of this bay which lies completely exposed at low tide.  Across the mud flats rises Trombay hill and in its shadow are all manner of things modern and dystopian, chemical factories, refineries, chimneys and nuclear reactors.  

It's understandably surprising that the flats (for a part of the year) are home to thousands of lovely, dainty flamingos. They don't the mob the place like at the Nyiragongo Crater.  Instead, they are numerous but evenly spaced.  

The birds apparently started coming to Sewri in 90s and they've been visiting ever since.  They are very industrious birds, perpetually sifting through the mud for victuals. 

The flats are a habitat for both Lesser and Greater Flamingos but we only saw Lesser Flamingos (you can identify them by their bills which are black as opposed to the pink found in greater cousins).  Some of the flamingos were white, I suspect that these were juveniles.  We clambered over rusting ships to get near them and found that not only were they lovelier and pinker up close, but that they were also gently honking to each other.  

We spotted other water birds as well; either a greenshank or a redshank, a curlew, a fat white bird which I couldn't identify and the slate grey one in this picture which I suspect to be a species of bittern. 

The view away from Sewri Jetty is of the new midtown skyline, completely discordant with the squalor and rust of the inner coast.  

Intriguingly, Sewri is also the location of an old fort - seen as a hillock in this picture.  This fort was built in 1680 by the British to protect their island colony from attacks by Siddis, a people descended from African slaves and mercenaries who had their own sultanate on the coast south of Bombay.

The fort is small but robust.  In its centre is a very grey courtyard, at the end of which stands a tall neem tree.  The powers that be have recently done a shoddy restoration job - just slapped cement on to the old stones.  The hillock is encroached on all sides by a dargah, buildings that look like government quarters and the ubiquitous shantytown. 

A pair of amorous koels silently canoodled, occasionally crooning to the other.  

An old vernacular style house shares the top of the hillock with the fort and the dargah.  So full of character, I'm sure it's not long for the world.

It was a brilliant Sunday morning that ended with a slightly heavy breakfast at the venerable Koolar & Co. at King's Circle.

Directions to Sewri from the suburbs: Take the Imax road south past Antop Hill, don't take the right towards Wadala bridge. Keep going down the road until you are parallel to the harbour line on your right.  Just before Sewri station, take a left and keep going until you hit a T (yes the place is the pits but you'll feel it's worth it after you see the birds), take a right and keep going until you get to the jetty.  

Ten Heritage Walks of Mumbai by Fiona Fernandez

I don’t know what I was expecting; something warmer and more erudite perhaps with the off-hope of a bit of wryness. Unfortunately, this is one of those sterile guides that substitute pictures (can’t even say they’re well taken) for substance. Instead of relaying facts about buildings and streets, Fernandez should have retold stories of old Bombay. Where’s the tale of the pirate attack on the fledgling city? There were agiaries or fire temples on most if not all of the walks. Fernandez offers information about who built them and why but never dwells on the remarkable tales of the members of the congregation. It’s not for a lack of resources because Bombay’s Parsi history is well documented. This was a fairly uninspiring tome. I don’t feel a shred of curiousity or longing to perambulate along any of the paths mentioned.  

The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card

Although its protagonist is a thirteen year old, The Lost Gate is definitely not suited for that age group. The teenager in question is Danny North, raised in a hidden community in rural Virginia. His kin are the relict of an ancient tribe of mages who once ruled humans as the gods of the Indo-European pantheon using their powers over rock, water, wind and animals. Their original home was Westil, a distant planet from where the ‘divine’ families migrated to Mittlegard (Earth) through a great gate created by a gatemage. However, in 632 AD, a powerful gatemage named Loki seals all the gates making Westil inaccessible, marooning the Westilians on Earth. Centuries later, the Westilian families are greatly weakened but constantly at war with each other. Their contempt for drowthers (muggles in Harry Potterish) continues despite humanity’s technological advancements which place them ahead of the mages’ much reduced powers. Gatemages are taboo and children who show any inkling towards gatemagery are swiftly killed. And yet the families covet the great gate because going through it can magnify their skills a hundred fold.  

Danny is perpetually ill treated by his relatives who believe him to be a drekka (non-magical person, is the term squib in Potterish?). His own parents are indifferent to him. That is until Danny discovers his ability to create gates – portals that can take him from any location to anywhere else. Fearing death, Danny flees the North compound and is adopted by Eric, an 18 year old delinquent who uses Danny to run a begging racket in Washington DC. When Eric discovers Danny’s secret, he coerces him to commit burglary. By a stroke of coincidence, Danny and Eric find shelter in the home of Stone, a mage of inferior abilities who belongs to a group called the Orphans. Stone recognizes Danny’s skill and sends him off some friends in Wisconsin to be trained. Intertwined with Danny’s story is the narrative on Wad, a powerful gatemage in the Westilian kingdom of Iceway who awakes after sleeping inside a tree for 14 centuries and becomes involved in palace intrigues in the kingdom’s capital. The plot predictably builds towards the moment where Danny constructs a great gate and once again links the two worlds. The consequence, of course, is the subject of the next book in the series. 

The Lost Gate was a fun read albeit a shallow one. The idea of ‘gating’ seems very similar to the theme of the film Jumper which I’m sure must have originally been a book. The plot is a little silly; everything falls neatly into place and everything has a faultless explanation. Also, it seems like Card used the story in its entirety to setup subsequent books. I sort of felt cheated towards the end. I understand the need to write sequels but I reckon it’s poor form to write singularly with part two, three and four in mind.  

Ol' Higue

In The Sly Company of People Who Care, the narrator goes on a long road trip into the Guyanese hinterland, during which his travelling companions regale him with local stories of the supernatural.  

“Of Ole Higue – that is, aged supernatural ladies how shed their skin and become balls of fire – he narrated the incident when a ball of fire accompanied the truck for thirty miles one night. Another time a girl in the family told people she’d seen ole Higue outside the window and guess what – the next day her thigh was covered with blue marks.”

I once had to recite a poem by a Guyanese poet, Wordsworth McAndrew, built around the Dutch-African legend of the blood-sucking crone for some sort of a cultural event. They picked me out of a school full of Caribbean voices because I sounded the most authentic :). It certainly is a lovely poem.  

OL' HIGUE

 Ol' woman wid de wrinkled skin,
 Leh de ol' higue wuk begin.
Put on you fiery disguise,
Ol' woman wid de weary eyes
Shed you swizzly skin.

 Ball o' fire, raise up high
Raise up till you touch de sky.
Land 'pon top somebody roof
Tr'ipse in through de keyhole - poof!

Open you ol' higue eye.
Find de baby where 'e lie
Change back faster than de eye.
Find de baby, lif de sheet,
Mek de puncture wid you teet',
Suck de baby dry.

 Before 'e wake an' start to cry
Change back fast, an' out you fly.
Find de goobie wid you skin
Mek de semidodge, then - in!
Grin you ol' higue grin.

 In you dutty powder gown
Next day schoolchildren flock you round.
"Ol' higue, ol' higue!" dey hollerin' out
Tek it easy, hold you mout'
Doan leh dem find you out.

 Dey gwine mark up wid a chalk
Everywhere wheh you got to walk
You bridge, you door, you jealousie
But cross de marks an' leh dem see
Else dey might spread de talk.

 Fly across dis window sill,
Why dis baby lyin' so still?
Lif' de sheet like how you does do,
Oh God! Dis baby nightgown blue!
Run fo' de window sill!

 Woman you gwine run or not?
Doan mind de rice near to de cot.
De smell o' asafoetida
Like um tek effect 'pon you.
You wan' get kyetch or what?

 But now is too late for advice,
'Cause you done start to count de rice
An' if you only drop one grain
You must begin it all again.
But you gwine count in vain.

Whuh ah tell you?

Day done, light an' rice still mountin'
Till dey wake an' kyetch you countin'
An' pick up de big fat cabbage broom
An' beat you all around de room.
Is now you should start countin'

Whaxen! Whaxen! Whaxen! Plai!
You gwine pay fo' you sins befo' you die.
Lash she all across she head
You suck me baby till um dead?

Whaxen! Whaxen! Plai!
You feel de manicole 'cross you hip?
Beat she till blood start to drip.

"Ow me God! You bruk me hip!
Done now, nuh? Allyou done!"

 Is whuh you sayin' deh, you witch?
Done? Look, allyou beat de bitch.
Whaxen! Whaxen! Pladai! Plai!
Die, you witch you. Die.
Whaxen! Whaxen! Plai!

by Wordsworth McAndrew

The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya

When people ask me to choose a favourite from all the places I’ve lived in, they’re puzzled or surprised at my response. “Guyana, is that in Africa?” or “But, didn’t you live in Australia...?” I imagined I would one day write a book to dispel this unfamiliarity but Rahul Bhattacharya has beaten me to it. It’d be hard to pack in praise about the place even from someone who leans towards it; ten day power cuts, tap water the colour of cola, battalions of blood sucking insects, gently rotting houses, leeched TV programs, violent crime, muddy seas and nothing to do but while away the time. Yet, I have such great memories of the place; catching eels in the storm water drains, lounging in the perpetually empty pool at a faded expat club, hanging out at the Sea Wall near the erstwhile Pegasus hotel (now the Le Meridian), driving out to the Corentyne and waving to the Surinamese on the other side of the riparian border, feeding the gullible manatees outside the zoo, bbqs from the back of a pick-up at the National Park, those curious names - Werk-en-rust, Albouystown, La Bonne Intention, Parfait Harmonie or the smell of my locality, Queenstown, after the rains, once full of moneyed families, now only their decaying old wooden mansions remain.  

I was perhaps too young to notice but the quirkiest thing about the Guyana was its populace. As one of the narrator’s neighbours tells him, “We got Blackman, redman, buck, chinee, coolie, dougla all lashin each other.” An unhurried, Naipaulian observation of these idiosyncratic living vestiges of history, geography and circumstance form the soul of The Sly Company of People Who Care. The book appears to be a travelogue in whose earliest chapters the author had a change of heart. Indeed in an interview to The Telegraph, Bhattacharya says “I was not sure what form the book would take but as I wrote the first few paragraphs it became clear it would be a novel because I was telling so many lies.” 

In the novel’s first section, we discover the narrator, an Indian cricket journalist who returns to Guyana after visiting it briefly to report on a match. He encounters Baby, a porknocker – a gold or diamond prospector – and makes off with him into the deep, unpopulated interior in search of diamonds. What starts as a rustic excursion disintegrates into something less cosy when Baby reveals himself to be more than just a jovial purveyor of bush tales. Bhattacharya is sharp and detailed but never wordy. He paints simple but vibrant scenes. “The sky was a brilliant blue, the air was yellow. The trail was red, the savannah was straw-brown rather than green, and the first sight of any other colour came hours later at an unexpected restaurant in Annai, where on the back of a parked pick-up a fresh head of cow glistened in a pool of fluorescent crimson.” At the National Library, the narrator discovers a pamphlet praising the Dutch civilising mission in the country where “the first three words had been struck out by a blotted, once garish, purple nib. They had been replaced by a single word. SLY. In the margin a sentence had been started, they think like they care – and abandoned due to excessive blotting.” It’s this subtlety of non-judgemental observation that makes this book so refreshing.

The second part of the book changes tack and the feel is that of a feature by a foreign correspondent than a novelist. The narrator explores stories in the mainly Indian villages along the coast and teams up with Ramotar Seven Curry, a professional wedding guest and bandies with Uncle Latch, his stoic former neighbour. In the last part, there is another journey, this one to neighbouring Venezuela with a companion – Jankey or Jan as she calls herself, an upwardly mobile coolie country gal. Here, the writing is introspective rather than seeking and one senses the narrator’s despondency at separation from the inertia of a country that’s not his own. So much so, that the sight of a Guyanese section in a provincial market provokes something stronger than just plain vanilla nostalgia. “There was something in the scenes. The Venezuelan shed, the song from Love Story, the beats. Cooliepeople milling about in coolie ways. The shabby, sparkless dressing, the uninspiring hairstyles, the flat resignation in those eyes that I knew from India to Guyana. The packets of Guyanese curry powder and Guyanese chowmein and bottles of brandless coconut oil, the stacks of Hindi discs. Twice removed diaspora, twice-removed attachments, perhaps twice-strong, the absurdity and obviousness of so many journeys, so many displacements.”

The strongest element of The Sly Company of People Who Care is its language. Bhattacharya embraces the local dialect in such a genuine way that words and sentences are enveloped by the inflection and grammar of an insular world. In fact, by the end of the book, my own knowledge of Creole was reawakening – s’trut! Of the two things that I thought could have been rendered better, the first is possibly the result of Bhattacharya’s day job. I think he tried to fit far too many and often unnecessary facts and current events into the book. At one point, I thought he was showing off but then I realized he was just being an overzealous reporter. The other weak bit is his failure (for the most part) to let the narrator reveal his faults, resulting in a somewhat lopsided image of a plucky adventurer rather than a somewhat insecure observer. The journey is more without than within. Perhaps, this is intentional or perhaps, I wasn’t perceptive enough to pick it up. In any case, The Sly Company of People Who Care was an excellent read, the best so far this year and I am really elated that it’s by an Indian writer.